My idea was to make him control the mouse pointer with his gaze, and use his voice to issue some commands (‘click !’, ‘scroll down !’…).
Alfred was my first attempt, but it did not went very far, due to a lack of time.

The Optikey project

In september 2015, thanks to a colleague, I heard about Julius Sweetland’s Optikey.
Julius has done an humongous work during 3 years to make barely the thing I dreamed of.

When Optikey is running, a visual keyboard takes your screen’s top, allowing to write words simply by looking to keys.
A dictionnary is used to make word suggestions, and the typed sentences will appear into any fields that previously had focus.
Words can also be spoken using Windows text-to-speech feature.

Localization and voice commands

I immediately got in touch with Julius, offering to merge my work within Optikey.
The usage of voice to trigger commands was in its roadmap, so he accepted my proposal.

But my first work was to entirely localize sources, and share with the growing OptiKey community on transifex online localization tool.
After two weeks of intense work, the whole application got English and French localization, and German came few days after.